Over The Weekend (Feb. 3 Edition)

Because nostalgia always sells, you’re going to see a lot of retrospectives this year for some important albums. A couple of weeks back there was an excellent oral history of Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain from Stereogum, and now it looks like it’s time for Green Day’s Dookie to get its moment in the sun. SPIN reprinted its profile of the band from back in 1994, and Stereogum took a quick look back with this retrospective. After we take a moment to contemplate the fact that an album called “Dookie” sold over 10 million copies and is remembered with great fondness, and that somehow the bratty young punks of Green Day are still making albums, take a look at what I believe is the most amazing part of both articles: that there was an incident where, of all people, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys was assaulted and accused of being a “sellout”.

Not surprisingly, the scenewide furor that has resulted combines the brutal energy of hardcore with all its lack of clearheadedness. Most inexcusably, at Gilman Street in May, former Dead Kennedys singer, Jello Biafra, was assaulted repeatedly and seriously injured by a punk kid while a crowd chanted “sellout” and “rock star.”